My Heroic Quest for Dinner

See, despite the fact that I really like to eat, I generally have a problem finding something I think is appealing in our kitchen. This could be because my family has an odd obsession with freezing things- including our bread. Whenever I ask them about this, I am always met with a "It stays fresh longer." Which I don't entirely agree with. Yes, I supposed, the actual loaf of bread does stay fresh longer if it is in the freezer, but is that really the point of keeping bread fresh? To break some kind of record? No, it's to keep the bread fresh as long as people are eating it. Correct? And nobody seems to grasp the fact that if you didn't have to microwave it, the loaf of bread might disappear faster, thus negating the need to keep it fresh for weeks.

And it's not just bread- every single piece of meat in this house is frozen. So, if you want a chicken sandwhich, let's say, you would have to take a scary frozen chicken breast out of the freezer (and actually discern that it is in fact chicken, and not some other meat), put it on defrost for ten minutes. Then you would have to turn it around and heat it on regular for another minute or so, and then the middle would still be frozen. Then you would have to get the bread out the fridge and microwave it, and then assemble the parts into a sandwhich that contained chicken that was so hot on the outside it burned your mouth, but still frozen in the middle, and bread that is wet and wilted because it had crystalized in the freezer. And it tastes freezerburned.

So, as I stumbled into the kitchen this evening, working on very few hours of sleep (remember, people, I'm not used to this), I did not feel like going through this whole ordeal. So I looked in the fridge. Nothing. Sour cream and shredded cheese. I could have combined these into something interesting, if only I had had taco meat. But that was frozen. So we moved on. I checked the other fridge. Well, checked was not really the word. Contorted myself would be more like it. My dad was doing something with the sink, so there was a chair shoved up against the counter. Between that and the waste basket (which I theoretically could have moved...), you had to stand on one leg and shove the other one between the door and the wall to keep it form closing while you peruse the contents. And there wasn't even anything there. Just ketchup. Again, perhaps this would have been tasty on a hamburger, but all those were FROZEN. Grrr.

Dejected, I contemplated making au gratin potatos from the box, but decided that twenty minutes was too long to wait. Finally, in a desperate attempt to find something that didn't involve a microwave, I descended into the basement where we keep our canned goods and such. I figured I could find soup or something. Even that wasn't easy. We had two kinds - cream of potato, and french onion.

Author's Note: At this time I would like to reflect on what led somebody to look at a potato and think, "Oh, I could put milk with this and come up with a really nauseating blend!" Moving on...

Now, I generally don't even like soup. Except brocolli cheese, which is really more thick. But I've also been desperate before. Once I even at these weird frozen egg rolls that my cousin stashed in our freezer for about a year. I figured if I could choke down Ko Thi Mi Chicken Rolls or whatever, I could take soup. I settled on cream of potato.

Once you actually got this stuff out of a can, it became even more disgusting than on the label. I'm not even sure I cooked it the right way, because there are chunks of potatos that look suspiciously like lumps of soup and therefore I was not sure if I should mash them up or what. Eventually I decided to crush anyting that didn't really looked like a potato. I think it worked, because I havne't thrown up yet.

I tried to choke it down for a few minutes, but eventually just gave up and picked the potatos out. And ate saltines. Those are tasty. I'm still kind of hungry, but I'll just get a muffin tomorrow morning. My final act in the kitchen was to search in vain for the grocery list that's usually taped the fridge so I could write in large red writing "BUY SOUP- TALK TO KATHLEEN FIRST!!!" Couldn't find it. Maybe it's in the freezer with the rest of our food... :)